The Gale of the World

by Henry Williamson

  He went on with his typing, adding to the quotation from The Alternative one short sentence.

  *

  ‘Well, there speaks the authentic voice of the Lost Legions of 1914–1945.’

  *

  And had no further idea until Miranda showed her face to say, “Oh, Cousin Phillip, this is a beautiful poem I’ve been reading! It was written by James Farrar when he was sixteen, in the late summer of nineteen forty. There are other poems, too, and some prose sketches. It’s beautiful and precise, like your own prose and that of Hereward Birkin!”

  She put typescript pages before him, and went back to the stool. Phillip read; and exclaimed,

  “This Battle of Britain poem has almost the mastery of Wilfred Owen, Miranda! We must get in touch with the writer at once. What is his name and address?”

  The girl didn’t reply. She seemed to have grown smaller as she sat huddled by the fire, arms drawn in, hands pressed to bosom, head bowed, eyes closed. He saw tear-drops on the tiled floor beside the dog-ear’d Notebook; and reading the letter sent with the poems, that the author was dead, resisted an impulse to comfort her; and went on typing.

  *

  ‘What poets fell in the continuation of the fratricidal European war which re-started in September, 1939? I know of one: James Farrar, a luminous youth who in a brief life wrote several lyrics in the English language which gave promise that here was a master.

  ‘James Farrar’s promise revealed itself when the tall, fair-faired boy was about sixteen years old. Imagine him wandering in the Surrey countryside one afternoon in the late summer of 1940, while the Battle of Britain was being fought twenty and thirty thousand feet over his head.’

  SEPTEMBER 1940

  I walk endlessly, no clock drips by the hours,

  The burnished hedgerows, clotted and high,

  The still woods, the dead meadows, the closed flowers,

  Shrunken under that bright scarred sky.

  A light-play, as of sun on August leaves,

  A height-soft moan, a wooden intermittent rattle,

  And, as the scrollèd conflict eastward weaves,

  Feelers drooping darkly out of battle.

  They come slowly, soft tap-roots questing down,

  At the groping tip of one glisters a bead of light:

  I see them, as waterflies struggling not to drown,

  Soundlessly pass into earth, and meet night.

  What is it that they are fallen?

  Sane men hold it to be just

  That each, when dead feed the earth like pollen,

  Lies strewn in some broken field in a wrack of dust.

  “Cousin Phillip, I like this poem also, very much!”

  THE BELOVED

  When I am in the fields she lies

  Alone upon the hills, for she is Day

  And I am Night, and brightest shine her eyes

  When I must look away.

  But briefly as in summer dawn we meet,

  Her beauty in a flood

  Burns vagrant through my blood.

  And when the swift floats high

  On molten tide of sunset, silently

  Together in the meadows do we lie,

  But never wed shall be:

  For soon she sleeps in mist and I must rise,

  And when the stars are grown

  Must seek the hills alone,

  “I must go now, cousin Phillip. Thank you for letting me see the contributions. I hope the shirt is all right. May I bring over the other tomorrow, if it’s a fine day?”

  *

  Lucy returning from the garden where she had gone, at Jonathan’s imperious bidding, to see an owl.

  “It sits on that old appletree every evening, watching for rats after the chicken food, Mum, and swivels its head right round to look down over its back! There! It’s just flown away!”

  The moon was shining. Lucy felt happy and relaxed, after taking old people in the Ford 8 to hospital, during the afternoon. There were letters to be opened. The first was from Phillip.

  “He sends his love to you, Tim, and says he knows you’ll succeed with your lathe work.”

  Tim was now regularly making boxes of ivory and sandal wood for a shop in Bond Street.

  “Well, well, well,” replied Tim—an expression of happy surprise.

  Lucy made some tea, and then opened her other letters.

  “Tim, do you remember Cousin Molly Bucentaur? She says she’s got a new little place on Exmoor, and mentions the Rivers-mills—you know, he’s the painter, he did a painting of one of Uncle George Abeline’s hunters. Molly says if ever the little boys want a change, to send them down to her next summer, during the holidays.” Lucy glowed with pleasure. “How very kind of her. I haven’t seen or heard from her since she dropped in to see us at Flumen Monachorum, when Phillip was away with Ernest, he’d just bought Deepwater farm. She had a sweet little daughter with her called Miranda.”

  “Ah.”

  Tim Copleston still felt a little uneasy whenever he thought of Phillip; he felt again the humiliation at the failure of those ghastly Works he and his two brothers had built in the old garden at Down Close, in the ’twenties, and lost all their money. Phillip had come to help them.

  To the simple-minded Tim, his brother-in-law had at times seemed to be mad. Once he had left a ‘little note’ for Phillip, putting it on top of a pile of County Court summonses, writs, judgment summonses and other beastly communications. Tim had written, To abuse us is to bemuse us‚ and Phillip had replied What do you think you three babes-in-the-wood do to me?

  Tim felt extra happy that Phillip had sent his love. He was looking forward to a long and happy life, with Brenda and their small son, staying in Lulu’s new house. It was almost like the old home at Down Close, he and Lulu together again!

  There was plenty of room wherein Tim could feel himself to be his own master. There were four main bedrooms, and four smaller ones, reached by three staircases: one central to the larger bedrooms; another to a wing; the third leading from the kitchen—approached by a stone-flagged passage to the rear of the premises —to what had once been servants’ quarters. The main bedrooms had heavy oak floors, laid down in the seventeenth century: planks sawn in timber pits, top-sawyers and bottom-sawyers sweating it out with saws ten inches deep and seven feet long, seventy hours and more a week. An oak-framed house, latticed windows, dark beams and rafters, lath-and-plaster inner walls and ceilings.

  “By Jove, Lulu, I simply love it here!”

  “Yes, Timmo, so do I! And the children adore it. Jonny with his secret passages, he and David playing hide-and-seek in the attics. Hark! They’re up there now!”

  Thumping noises came through the oak-frame of the house. The boys had climbed up through a trap-door to their hidey-hole in the cavernous gloom under the slates of the roof.

  A wonderful place for the children to explore!

  “Mum and Uncle Tim,” said Jonathan, coming into the kitchen, “I’ve written four pages in my note-book on the habits of bats. They eat death-watch beetles, so they do some good!”

  “Cor, I what-you-call like this house, ’bor,” said David to Uncle Tim.

  “Ah.”

  *

  In Devon Phillip, too, was happy.

  “Cousin Phillip, I’ve brought over your other shirt.”

  Miranda again on the stool, checking Phillip’s typescript against the copy. “It’s all so vivid, isn’t it, Cousin Phillip? I know the mag. will sell. Do you think readers would like to read how poets acquire their style?”

  “The good writer re-creates what he sees and hears. Robert Graves writes somewhere that Keats often used the sense of taste. ‘And lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon’—all lip-work. But clear-seeing is the true writer’s base—his eyes. A blind writer produces an oddly colourless prose.” And he thought, I mustn’t work so long by candlelight. My left eye feels as though it has a thorn in it. Well, if I do go blind I’ll still have colours in my brain-cells.

 
“It is awfully good of you to spare time for the magazine, Miranda. And for bringing back my shirt. I suppose you’re on your way to Lynton?”

  He hoped she would say no.

  “I must go sometime today, Cousin Phillip, to see ‘Buster’. There’s no particular hurry. How did the bass taste?”

  “I gave what I couldn’t eat, less the bones, to Bodger. Look at the result!”

  A barrelline Bodger was lying, legs straight out, on the sack. But one eye was open, taking it all in.

  “You didn’t bring Capella with you this time.”

  “Mummie thought she should be kept in the paddock while she’s in season.”

  “I suppose the Boniface herd is more or less of one blood, like the ancient Pharoahs?”

  “So far as we know, Cousin Phillip. There’s no stud book. Daddy’s giving the goats to the Lynton Council when he comes home in the summer for the cricket. He wants the herd to remain all-white, and in one locality.”

  “To be uniform with cricket flannels, boots, and pads, no doubt!”

  “Of course!” she laughed. Then, “May I help you today, or shall I be a nuisance?”

  Bodger’s eye closed. He had heard it all. She was staying, so was Phillip. He could go to sleep again.

  “Read some of Farrar to me, will you, Miranda. Your voice is so soft and sensitive.” I am courting her, I am seducing her spiritually—Miranda sitting on the stool—Cinderella with happy face—one hand slowly stroking the ear of Bodger, who had moved beside her. Then dog’s head stretching up on neck, cocked ears directed towards door. Phillip saw two shadow-breaks in the light between door-skirt and threshold. “We’ve got an audience of two boots outside,” he whispered.

  “That smallholder?”

  “How we think alike.” To Bodger, “Calm down, those boots won’t kick you again. Please read on, Miranda.”

  The girl hesitated. “Cousin Phillip, I’m afraid!”

  “We’ll soon settle that!”

  He went to the door and pulled it open.

  “Come to see how Bodger is getting on, Mr. Kedd?”

  “Noomye! Now mind what you’m about wi’ thaccy maid, midear! I’ve told ee!!” And turning round, the fellow shambled away.

  “Poor chap, what a mess he’s in”, said Phillip, quietly. “I’ll see you down to Barbrook when you have to go, Miranda. Can you spare the time to read a little more? Your voice is so clear, and I live what you’re reading.”

  After giving an account of green plovers on an airfield getting in the way of an aircraft taking off, and being driven right through the leading edge into the wing of an Oxford, wedged into broken plywood, her voice stopped. Pretending not to notice her emotion, he said, “By hard objective writing the effect is greatest on the reader, Miranda. The writer feels the emotion, but transmits it calmly. Also the good writer knows the value of original detail—he was what a child once said I had—‘gazing eyes’—he sees his own detail, in contrast with that used by most writers, out of somebody else’s books or newspapers.”

  “Your eyes still do gaze,” she said, looking up at him. “Sometimes a little disconcertingly. Oh, I’m sorry, Cousin Phillip, I didn’t mean to be personal! Shall I go on reading?”

  “Yes please.”

  “‘A few nights ago we had twenty degrees of frost at only fifteen thousand feet. One kite was at twenty-two in thirty-five degrees of frost. Facing backwards in the famous Beaufighter near-hatch draught, I lost my right hand fairly soon. I haven’t been so cold since early in 1940 on the farm at Epping. When I was at last able to turn round and begin thawing out, a strange thing happened. First I held my gloved hand under the heater—only for a short time as I could feel the bursting sensation which indicates that external heat is not good when there’s no circulation. Then I pulled off the leather gauntlet and the silk glove and rubbed my hand against the other glove. All things were now equal, though I didn’t know it. My slight knowledge of physics supports it adequately, but at the same time I was slightly shaken to see greenish two-inch sparks coming from my finger tips when I began to push them into the silk glove again. Later I drew my full-gloved fingertips down the perspex and little bristly sparks, bright green, danced about them’.”

  “Excellent stuff! We’ll include that, Coz. What fun it is you’re here! Work is a pleasure!”

  “I’ve chosen three more pieces, Cousin Phillip. Shall I read them? They’re short.”

  “But if you’re going to see ‘Buster’, oughtn’t you to go now? I don’t want you to be lost on The Chains in the dark.”

  “I can stay the night with Cousin Hugh. Please let me read just this one piece.”

  He nodded. She read, “‘First there is only the ghost. Far down in the black water, a ghost of light. It is a pallid thing, like the gleam on the side of some great fish that speeds through the depths. Very gradually it rises and gleams a drowned red, and then becomes brighter. And at last begins to writhe, and is a dreadful orange fan facing across the water with a mist of the same light about it.

  “‘The blazing bomber sinks to embrace it. For a long moment, as if in a final agony, it holds off. But it droops. It begins to fly through a vaporous glow as the propeller-tips touch. Then the strength goes out of it, and four white ribbons sear across the face of the water, and very suddenly there is a great brow of spray flung forward, and a slowing surge, and the other bombers are going on alone while a flame dies into the sea behind them.’”

  “Marvellous writing, Miranda! We’ll print all your selections! Now I’ll see you on your way to The Eyrie.”

  “I think I’ll go straight home. I’ve just thought that Cousin Hugh may be in London.”

  When he had returned from seeing her as far as the Exe Plain, well beyond Aaron Kedd’s cot down Horrock water, Phillip continued the typing of his editorial, again working by a single candle until the pain in his eye seemed to be about to burst the eyeball. He sat at the table, both eyes clenched tight.

  While he was feeling his way upstairs, Molly in ‘Goats Castle’ (as local moorfolk called the combined cottages) was saying good-night to Miranda, who now had a small bedroom to herself.

  “Darling, you’ve been weepy again.”

  “I know, Mummy. It is all so beautiful, and yet so sad.”

  “What is, my pet?”

  “The poet we’ve been writing about, a boy called James Farrar who was killed flying with the Royal Air Force.”

  “‘We’ve been writing about’, darling? Who is ‘we’? Do you mean Cousin Phillip? I thought you were going to see Cousin Hugh this morning?”

  “I was on my way there, but dropped in at Cousin Phillip’s place, to leave the shirt you’d mended, but stayed to help. The time simply flew!”

  “You were there all day, darling?”

  “It was so interesting, Mummy, really it was. The extracts from the Notebook were so good, I simply had to stay and help finish them. I copied one out, please listen and understand, Mummy darling!”

  AFTER NIGHT OFFENSIVE

  Glowed through the violet petal of the sky

  Like a death’s-head the calm summer moon

  And all the distance echoed with owl-cry.

  Hissing the white waves of grass unsealed

  Peer of moon on metal, hidden men,

  As the wind foamed deeply through the field.

  Rooted to soil, remote and faint as stars,

  Looking to neither side, they lay all night

  Sunken in the murmurous seas of grass.

  No flare burned upwards: never sound was shed

  But lulling cries of owls beyond the world

  As wind and moon played softly with the dead.

  Molly went downstairs thinking that Miranda was too young to be emotionally disturbed: she must drop a hint to Phillip that Anda, for all her apparent objectivity, was very temperamental, and emotionally immature. She was at a difficult age. Why this extraordinary obsession about the Great War? Well, it was the age of anxiety, someone had written. Wa
r—war—war—would there ever be an end to it?

  The following day, when Phillip called to thank her for mending his shirts, and also for putting him on to a printer, Molly had determined what line to take.

  “I’m so glad Anda was able to be useful for your first number, dear Phillip. Hugh Cloudesley did say something about a girl friend in London who may be coming down to help you both in your literary work—you two sharing her services. Until she comes, I am most willing to help you in any way I can. I’m not clever like Anda, but I may be of use in weeding out the wrong sort of articles sent to you.”

  “What a kind family you are! I must say I do feel a little overwhelmed. By every post review copies of all kinds of books arrive, ever since an advertisement I put in the ‘Literary Supplement’. It’s a good thing I’ve got the Silver Eagle to collect them from the Post Office. Now I suppose I must go to London, while the galleys of the first number are being set-up in type, to canvass advertisements from publishers. It’s no good merely expecting them to send them in.”

  “Why not let Laura do that while she is in London?”

  “She’s a writer, too, Molly. I don’t like to interrupt anyone who has a book on the stocks.”

  “The pearl in the oyster comes by irritation, my dear.”

  “So does many a human embryo, but when the mother’s in labour she mustn’t be disturbed! Oh yes, I wonder if I might leave Bodger here while I’m away in London?”

  “Capella will simply adore to have a playmate, dear Coz.”

  He drove away east at a moderate speed, since petrol was still rationed‚ and he wanted to keep the reserve of six two-gallon tins brought from the farm.

  Laura greeted him quietly: yes, she was writing her novel: no, she was sorry she couldn’t possibly break off to canvass advertisements at the moment.

  “Perhaps you should wait until Miranda leaves school.”

  He spent two days going the rounds of publishers. Thirty-two houses, some new-started by printers whose paper supplies were not rationed, promised to write to him … the usual polite dismissals. He telephoned Laura.